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Month: May 2016

One of my passions when it comes to things Kemetic is the sounds of the language used in ritual… So I comb through the linguistic Egyptological literature looking out for reconstructed vocalizations, especially those relevant to Earlier Egyptian (Old Egyptian + Middle Egyptian). Among those, the reconstructions of names of Gods and Goddesses are important since they impact ritual so directly. They also differ from the forms known to us all, since most of the names we use today are a) Greek or Coptic forms that had undergone a number of sound shifts and translation into an entirely different language (in the case of Greek names) by the time they were written or b) pronunciations according to the intentionally artificial system Egyptologists use for Egyptian words or c) hybrids of a) and b). The reconstructed vocalizations scholars have and are developing work with various kinds of evidence (including the Greek and Coptic versions of words) to arrive at form that better reflects the sounds earlier in Egyptian history. This is often a fuzzy target, but sometimes we can recover a series of stages as a word changed over time. Scholars (and whole schools of scholars) vary in their approaches to this, of course. There are many open questions as to what can and cannot be safely inferred and how the writing system can be used to recover vowels (or not). Many of the reconstructions in the literature are incomplete in the sense that certain vowels (and sometimes consonants) are left unspecified when we do not have adequate evidence to define them. Other times reconstructions contain vowels that had already transformed historically and so represent a later historical period than Earlier Egyptian (1). The field is quite a live one in Egyptology though now, after a period of around 50 years in the latter part of the twentieth century when syntactic arguments dominated the field and morphology and phonology was distinctly less emphasized.

So I face a conundrum in trying to fully pronounce a word or name for singing or recitation – I can’t rely on complete data all the time. In those cases, I will do my best to pick the sound that best fits known patterns (there are many well documented patterns for nouns, and some for verb forms too) or that sounds best to me. I do confess I rely on Arabic in this process sometimes, which shares kinship and many phonological and morphological similarities with Egyptian. That way I can use the names and words now, to deepen practice and get closer to the poetics and rhythms of the language, which we know were very important to how ritual speech worked in Egypt. This is something I will return to again and again in these postings, so bear with me if I leave details aside for now. My hope, of course, is that new evidence and/or theoretical progress will arise to fill in some of these gaps. But we will always be using vocalizations that are partially synthesized and simplified from the actual speech situation at any particular time among any particular speech community from Ancient Egypt. We will never achieve perfection in this. But I believe it is an honorable goal to attempt to get as close as possible as way to deepen our appreciation of the art, the magic, and the power of these words.

With that said, here are some names of Gods and Goddesses in a form closer to how they sounded in the early New Kingdom Temples (2). They will undoubtedly change over time as more information is gathered, and I’ll try to post those updates as they come along. Please know that they are presented here not to say that you have to use them or to disparage the names you already use for the Gods and Goddesses. Use them if and as you like – for experimenting in your own practice, or to help you understand the rhythmic structure and word plays found in the ritual texts (refer to slide 19 in Weaving the Cloth of Reality: Word and Sound in Egyptian Ritual).

(1) This often results in originally different vowels being combined into a neutral schwa-like sound, or ‘e’ (written in Coptic with the Greek letter epsilon) or long stressed e (represented in Coptic by the Greek letter eta). For example, stressed e results from earlier stressed i or stressed u (the two shifts happening sequentially). So, in a word that survives in Coptic with eta, we can only say the vowel was likely í: or ú: originally.

(2) An asterisk will indicate names where I have supplied a vowel. A double asterisk will indicate a name I have reconstructed myself, using vowel transformation rules, survivals in Coptic and Greek, and other evidence in the literature.

Tefnut * tifú:nat [t^(f)fûnat] Ray LingAeg 2004, 150 (For those with sharp eyes, you may notice that this vocalization is different from the one used in the Weaving the Cloth presentation at Pantheacon. My bad there, I simply did not cross check with my database, and substituted the pattern found in the name of Wadjet erroneously).

Key to pronunciations of Egyptian words in the God Names in this post. Note that the explanatory text in square brackets [], contains other characters as well, since I have tried to stick as closely as I can to the various authors’ usages. WordPress also limits posts to one very limited font, so I have had to expunge text in Coptic and Greek (mostly) and convert some characters to reasonable equivalents for the Blog.

a, i, u = short pure vowels: the ‘a’ of “father”, ‘ee’ of “beet”, ‘u’ of “Luke” but short in duration.

: = long vowel duration, hold the vowel preceding the colon longer – about twice as long

’ = glottal stop, a catch in the throat that stops the sound momentarily, like the transition between the two syllables of English “Uh-oh” or the way a person speaking British Cockney slang would say the two ‘tt’ in “bottle”

Ꜥ = a consonant with the sound of the Arabic letter `ain – not present in English or related languages. It is common in languages of the Afro-Asiatic language phylum, to which Egyptian, Arabic, Aramaic, Syriac, Somali, and many others belong. It is made by constricting the throat and forcing air past the blockage. To give a rough idea of the sound, try saying ‘ah’ and slowly (carefully!) pushing your throat just above the Adam’s apple with your fingers to restrict the airflow. Here is a video which may help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0ro6b50-Lk

ḥ = an h stronger than English, sort of like a cat or iguana hissing, similar to the strong ‘j’ in Latin American Spanish “Juan”

Note: Peust here uses an aspirated/unaspirated opposition for the sounds represented by graphemes t (Gardiner X1, bread loaf) and d (Gardiner D46, hand), instead of the more typical unvoiced/voiced opposition. But cf. his paper: Peust, Carsten 2008. On consonant frequency in Egyptian and other languages. Lingua Aegyptia 16, 105-134, where he revises this view in favor of an unvoiced/emphatic (not voiced) opposition. All reconstructions are noted here as published in Peust Hiero 2001.

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This piece is a kind of poetic experiment. It is two independent texts (one composed by me in English, one transcribed from Egyptian) constructed and interleaved in a way that allows them to be read as one continuous poem, individually, or in a combination of languages. So at least three readings are possible (more if there are two or three readers and/or the texts are read in A, B, and A+B sequence in both languages). The inspiration comes from a moment just at dawn in January 2016, when hundreds of birds appeared seemingly from nowhere above the great Deir el Bahari Temple of Hatshepsut. The Temple’s proper name is Djeser Djeseru, which forms the title.

Djeser Djeseru

(ḏá:sir ḏasú:ru)

Dawn light and cliff glow

Bathe stone walls and altar –

White, orpiment, and umber

Blend to gold. There are birds, birds –

(wannaná nan apúdyu ḥarúsin ma rámaṯ ḳádsin ma apúdyu)#

(How these birds exist is with their faces as people and their nature as birds,)*

Banking and turning above, like waves against the cliffs, not touching, not crashing,

In conscious flow they call through the rock cove – Living, living.

(wúꜤꜤu amá madwáf ḫíft sanúwif ma mádu ramí:wat)

(One of them speaking to the other with the speech of crying.)

Crying like the Ba of Shu, a wind of souls,

They greet the shining sun who woke them

From dark caves beyond the mountain.

From lament to joy, their songs cheer – healing, healing,

(ará ma-ḫít iwásin ar wanmá sí:mu ar saḏfá’ ma kú:mat)

(After they come to eat plants and get nourished in the Black Land,)

As their waves subside. Dry rock silence replaces echoes of voices

And they descend to lush fields of birsim and sesame, cabbage and cane. Flying, flying,

(ḫanyásin ẖur ḥíḏwat nit pú’at)

(alighting under the brightness of the sky,)

They move to broader day. New light subsumes old thoughts.

Across flat rich land and canals,

The spectrum widens in greens and metal-shine,

Yet with old rhythms still sounding, sounding –

(ḫaparḫarásin ma ḳádsin (ni) apúdyu)

(then they change into their nature of birds.)

In their separated hearts, now just people, now just birds,

Echoes linger of Gods they praised in Most Sacred of Sacred Places:

Blessing, blessing.

Matt Whealton, May 2016, May 2017, January 2018

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Notes:

Djeser Djeseru is the Egyptian name of the Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el Bahri. The Name is often translated as ‘Holy of Holies’. Here I translate as “Most Sacred of Sacred Places”, since Holy of Holies carries some confusing connotations from usage in other religious traditions. Djeser Djseru is the proper name of the Temple here. The central, most sacred shrine in a temple is usually called Per-Wer (pr-wr) ‘Great House’, or sometimes Set-Weret (s.t-wr.t) ‘Great Seat/Throne’.